Hulton (Image: Fuel Coffee)
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Fuel Coffee is busy overhauling the space below the Casa Del Ray apartments to be its fourth Seattle location and second on Capitol Hill as it prepares to continue “the legacy of great coffee and quick service” of the famed walk-up counter.
“As you all know, Vivace made this location a community pillar, and we all mourned its closing,” the Fuel announcement reads.
Don’t worry. The old Vivace shrine featuring Caffeina, Goddess of the Waking Day should still be in place.
CHS reported this spring as the Vivace family bid goodbye to the popular counter space after decades of service as it faced challenges around staffing and its proximity to the still-bustling Broadway Vivace cafe. The sidewalk stand has been a connection to Vivace’s beginnings with an open-air coffee bar serving a winding sidewalk line of customers. There was a time when you could depend on it for the earliest opening among Capitol Hill caffeine sources.
“The Brix location has a sweeping curved bar topped with Caffe Forest Brown soapstone, full pastry selection, a quiet room for meetings and a children’s corner wrapped in glowing yellow walls,” Vivace co-founder David Schomer told CHS earlier this year. “We cannot compete with ourselves!”
Quiet since its early May shuttering, the bar is now being prepared for a new life under the Fuel flag in the Ada’s family of cafes and bookstores. The company made an X-Files worthy sneak tease about the Broadway plans earlier this month.
CHS reported here in May of 2020 on the Ada’s acquisition of Fuel from founder Dani Cone as Danielle and David Hulton set out on a plan to expand their mix of cafes and bookshops across the city. Ada’s arrived on 15th Ave E in fall 2013 after the Hultons made a big leap from a small space off northern Broadway and bought the dilapidated home of Horizon Books to refurbish, enhance, and overhaul into a new chapter for a “technical” book shop.
In 2018, the Hultons built on their cafe and coffee program with one of the more unexpected link-ups in Capitol Hill food+drink history. The Lounge by AT&T and Ada’s Discovery Cafe opened in 2018 on E Thomas project just off Broadway in the newly constructed Vertex Apartments. Ada’s Discovery was part neighborhood coffee shop, part AT&T sales and marketing. The plug was pulled on the experiment during the pandemic. Outdoor gear rental and community company Gearhouse made the E Thomas cafe its Capitol Hill headquarters.
As for the Ada’s family of businesses, the addition of the new Fuel walk-up is a return to Broadway where the bookstore debuted in the Loveless Building in 2010.
The hopes are for the counter to re-open soon but a little more paperwork has to be taken care of first.
The new Fuel coffee bar on Broadway is located at 321 Broadway E. Learn more at fuelcoffeeseattle.com.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING
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Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍
So glad coffee is coming back. Are they pro-union?
Nope, just pro-having-tech-money.
Yuck. That sucks. Hope their workers wise up.
As the former citizen of the Soviet Union, this kind of questions make me cringe. Are you the member of the communist party?)) So every company, every small business should be unionized? Wake up.
Agreed. How about finding out how management treats them first? And if they’re treated crappy, why do they work there? There are literally hundreds of other jobs out there.
Given that were in the midst of several starbucks closing across the hill from union busting, I think it’s a fair question to ask if a business is pro-union. That’s nowhere near ensuring you have the same political beliefs as the state party, pro-union doesn’t even imply they are unionized, just that they support the right to unionizing, something far too many people seem to think isn’t a right. Historically, worker rights and good treatment haven’t come from benevolent owners, but from organized labor movements around the world…
Worker rights have come from governments and democratic processes. Period.
Are you resorting to cringe red-scare comments?
This is great news for Broadway!
Bummed to see Fuel (Ada’s) occupying this once hallowed coffee ground after ruining the Fuel on 19th Ave :/
I just wish Fuel’s coffee were good. They don’t know how to make it like Vivace – or a dozen other good places on the hill.
bring back the cute names, fuel is for straight men